What else is the UN for, if not to be a stage where representatives of criminal states come to perform a tap dance act that borrows from burlesque? Like Ebrahim Raïssi, Iranian President, at the United Nations in September 2022, after the assassination of Mahsa Amini. While demonstrations were daily throughout Iran, the master of repression brandished, as proof of American imperialist oppression, a portrait of General Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Bashar al-Assad’s victory in Syria with its formidable Shiite militias, the spearhead of Iran’s toxic foreign policy in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq. Then, unable to stop there, discussing the successes of the Iranian revolution, “a society engraved in justice and the preservation of human rights”, without laughing.
This speech says what the UN has become. A bad joke. Kofi Annan, its former secretary general, had already warned in 2006: “Politicization has undermined the sessions of the Human Rights Council to such an extent that its declining credibility casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system united as a whole.” This is how the UN entrusted the Islamic Republic of Iran with the presidency of the Social Forum of the Human Rights Council in November 2023 in Geneva. Moreover, it was an edifying Forum: Iranian officials simply cut off the microphones of critical NGOs during the meetings. The mullahs censored themselves at home in the UN compound. Because the UN has become the favorite forum of the world’s dictators and tyrants.
The new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, considers that the theory of the “great replacement” is the biggest problem today: “In many countries, including in Europe and in In North America, I am concerned about the apparently growing influence of so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theories, which are based on the misconception that Jews, Muslims, non-white people and migrants seek to replace, or suppress, cultures and peoples of countries.” I admit I was startled when I heard that the “great replacement” theory also concerned Jews. I remind you that there are only 15.7 million Jews in the world, and that 46% of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel. I don’t really see by what miracle the Jews could “greatly replace” anyone, but, well, perhaps it was with the aim of inclusion that Volker Türk mentioned the Jews.
Contempt for Western man
And then it is true that in the face of the genocide of the Uighurs in China, of the Rohingya in Burma, the war which has decimated North Kivu for thirty years, displacing 7 million people, the massacres and abuses committed by the Islamists in the Sahel , the hunt for sub-Saharan migrants led by Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed or the invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, not to mention the war in Ukraine or the Israel-Hamas war, the great human rights concern the homiste of the moment can only be the theory of the “great replacement”.
Without forgetting the great misfortune that the “great replacement” is associated with the “anti-woke” war – again according to Volker Türk. And that’s how one fine morning we discovered that Yascha Mounk (The Identity Trap), Samuel Fitoussi (Woke Fiction), Jean-François Braunstein (Woke Religion), Nathalie Heinich (Would Wokism be totalitarianism?), Chloé Morin (When he is twenty) or Pierre-Henri Tavoillot are horrible and dangerous fascists, are against minorities and especially against women! It is well known that all these intellectuals wake up in the morning wondering how they are going to destroy inclusion.
“Treating all men with the same kindness and lavishing kindness indiscriminately can just as easily demonstrate a deep contempt for men as a sincere love for them,” wrote Nietzsche. I bet that for Volker Türk this above-ground speech is the expression of his shame and his contempt for Western man.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
.